Somatic Social Justice Is How We Come Home
What if our path to liberation doesn't start in the mind, but in the body? What if winning isn’t about outsmarting the empire, but metabolizing the grief, rupture, and survival reflexes it encoded into our nervous systems?
We live in a time when movements are burning out, strategies are collapsing, and the systems we seek to dismantle are being reproduced in our tone, our pace, our organizing culture. Why? Because our nervous systems were never taught how to stay present in rupture. We were trained to dissociate, to perform, to dominate or disappear.
This is not just a psychological issue. This is a political and ancestral one. Our bodies carry the imprints of colonization, white supremacy, and trauma. As Resmaa Menakem teaches, white-body supremacy is not just a cultural structure. It is a trauma-based operating system. It lives in our posture, our reactions, our breath. Oppression, therefore, is not only structural. It is somatic.
The impact is intergenerational. Trauma encoded in the nervous system doesn't end with one person. It passes from womb to womb, through tone, silence, inherited fear, and unconsciously replicated survival strategies. Our movements often fail not because we don’t have the right political frameworks, but because we have not metabolized the somatic legacies of domination that shape how we lead, how we move, and how we relate.
bell hooks once said that education is either the practice of freedom or the maintenance of domination. If that is true, then we must ask: what kind of nervous systems are holding our classrooms, our protests, our meetings? Are they systems that can metabolize grief and rage? Or do they perform healing while reproducing urgency, control, and collapse?
Somatic Abolition: A Necessary Praxis
Somatic abolition isn’t about making wellness a side dish. It is not a curated aesthetic, a weekend retreat, or a polished brand. It is the trembling altar of justice inside our fascia. The revolution will not be live-streamed. It will be felt, through the breath, the belly, the breaking open.
Our nervous systems are the oldest organizing technology we have. Before there was Wi-Fi, there was witness. Before there were tools, there was touch. Liberation must live in our lungs, our guts, our cells. It must be practiced through communal grounding, communal orientation, communal movement, and communal touch. Not as metaphors, but as somatic daily rituals that anchor us in the here and now.
Resmaa Menakem’s cultural somatics framework gives us these four portals. They are not luxury practices. They are technologies of survival that white-body supremacy tried to erase. They are also how we stop organizing empire while trying to resist it.
These portals map onto ancient Indigenous healing practices that honored breath, rhythm, grief, joy, and communal processing as integral to community survival. They help us rebuild what colonialism tried to sever: our connection to our own internal signal and our embodied interdependence with each other and the Earth.
Oppression Lives in the Body, So Must the Undoing
The state does not only live in jails or laws. It lives in the body. In the flinch at a siren. The tightening of the jaw when speaking truth. The instinct to shrink. These are not simply habits. They are embodied trauma responses passed down through generations of violence, disconnection, and grief.
Dr. Jennifer Mullan calls this "the embodiment of colonization itself."
Our disembodiment is not a coincidence. It is a survival strategy turned into a cultural norm. It is how empire sustains itself: by teaching us to shut down, numb out, or collapse. Without reckoning with this, our movements risk reproducing the same domination we are fighting to end.
We see this in how urgency replaces process, how perfectionism masks fear of failure, and how conflict avoidance often masquerades as peacekeeping. We see it when bodies of color are hyper-scrutinized in organizing spaces, when grief is shamed, and when slowness is interpreted as incompetence.
Political Education Without Somatics is Just Performance
Knowing about oppression is not the same as unlearning it from the body. Our organizing spaces often reproduce urgency, perfectionism, saviorism, and control. Not because we are uncommitted, but because our nervous systems were trained by trauma to survive domination.
Assata Shakur reminded us that the schools we go to are reflections of the society that created them. Our institutions, even our movements, were not built to hold our grief, our rage, or our longing. That is why somatic abolition is not a supplement. It is central.
We must teach the body what safety feels like before asking it to imagine liberation. And safety is not always comfort. Sometimes safety is spaciousness, rupture that is held instead of punished, conflict that leads to repair, and boundaries that honor the body’s wisdom rather than override it.
As bell hooks said, liberation must engage the whole person: mind, body, and spirit. Otherwise, we are just rebranding oppression with new language.
Somatics Is Ancestral. Somatics Is Political. Somatics Is Required.
This is not new. This is ancient. This is Indigenous. The wisdom of the land, of ceremony, of breath and slowness, was always about nervous system regulation. Robin Wall Kimmerer teaches that “all flourishing is mutual,” and that mutuality begins in the body.
Somatic abolition is how we return to that ancestral rhythm. It is how we grieve together. Dance under the stars. Regulate in sacred space. Honor the nervous system as an altar, not an afterthought.
Laura van Dernoot Lipsky reminds us that witnessing injustice without tending to the body leads to burnout and reenactment. Presence, boundaries, slowness, and grief are not distractions. They are integrity made flesh.
Healing becomes a communal act of resistance. It is how we refuse to let empire fracture our internal landscape. It is how we unhook from urgency and remember we are not machines. It is how we reclaim the sacred pulse of life beneath the programming of productivity.
The Movement We Are Building
This is why I founded the Right 2 Exist Festival. Because what we are building is not just a response to theory. It is a living intervention. A field of breath, rhythm, and return. A ceremony of what it means to be human, again.
We are the ones who remember the future before it arrives. We are the ones who tremble the truth back into the Earth. And we are the ones who know that justice is not just a principle. It is a frequency the body must learn to carry.
So I ask:
Are you willing to become a body that can hold the heat of freedom? Can you grieve and still rise? Can you love and still roar?
Because the body never forgot. And now, we are remembering.
We are walking home.
Citations:
(1) Menakem, Resmaa. My Grandmother’s Hands (2017)
(2) Mullan, Dr. Jennifer. Decolonizing Therapy (forthcoming)
(3) hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress (1994)
(4) Shakur, Assata. Assata: An Autobiography (1987)
(5) Hemphill, Prentis. "Where We Become Free" (2021)
(6) Williams, Jordan Michael. Stay Woke (2023)
(7) Fikes, Kiesha. "What Bodies Do in Social Movements" (2020)
(8) Menakem, Resmaa. Cultural Somatics Skills 4-Pack (2021)
(9) Menakem, Resmaa. Tracking the Embodied Sensing of Racialized Harm (2021)
(10) Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
(11) Lipsky, Laura van Dernoot. Trauma Stewardship (2009)